The Ninth Wife (9 page)

But then in her paper she is also supposed to write about how this particular philosophy—this balance—applies to her life outside of class, and here she is stumped. Like many of her fellow folklorists, she is often in awe of the genuine, unassuming, talented craftspeople and folk musicians she meets through her work. She has spent her career increasing, or in some cases creating audiences for them, but is that a fair exchange for all they’ve taught her? She finished graduate school with a near-perfect GPA and yet what does she know of the world?

And what of a balance in her personal life? Do the things she enjoys doing compensate for the things she doesn’t enjoy doing, or hates doing, or fears doing, like, say, dating? This week, the answer is a no-brainer. In this first week of her thirty-sixth year she feels like a big yin-yang failure.

She crosses into Maryland where the large houses on hills sit atop hoop skirts of perfectly mowed lawns. She is headed to Rockville where her grandparents—Millie and Irv—moved more than twenty years ago. Over the decades they’d migrated steadily northward and westward through the district, up from their first years of marriage in the 1940s at Q and Sixteenth Streets, to Cleveland Park where they adopted and raised Bess’s mother in the ’50s and ’60s, and on into Bethesda when Bess’s mother moved in with Bess’s dad on Capitol Hill at the start of the 1970s. In the ’80s, when Bess was in her early teens and living with her mom back in Bethesda, her grandparents made their final move farther out to the Maryland suburbs.

This was a common route for Jews in Washington, D.C., the first of whom migrated from Baltimore in the mid-1800s. Irv claimed that his great-great-great-grandfather was among those who fled persecution in Germany and came to the New World, to Baltimore, in 1848—the year a sawmill worker discovered gold and sparked a mass exodus to the west, also the year they broke ground in the District of Columbia to build the Washington Monument. “
Nu?
” he’d say. “My ancestors come and suddenly they either run for the hills or build a big
schmeckle
.” Bess tried but failed to verify his assertion. Still, she liked his stories.

“My family was in the dress business,” Irv had told her. “Why? Probably my great-grandfather liked to know what touched his hands would also touch the naked bodies of the dames in town. But that’s it. End of story.”

“What’s with you, no story,” Millie chimed in. “Always with the no story, he’s got nothing to say your grandfather, you believe that one? Don’t listen to him.” She looked like she was about to tell a secret.

“What’s with the face?” he said. “We Steinblooms are normal law-abiding people. Well, except for Uncle Abe, this is true.”

“See, there he goes.”

“Uncle Abe, boy. He used to play fiddle down at the movie houses. I was too young to go into those places, but I could hear him from the street. He drank too much, but he was a good musician, and you know what? They asked him to be part of this new orchestra they were putting together back then, and you know what I’m talking about, Bessie? It was the National Symphony Orchestra!”

Bess noticed when it came to talking about the past, Millie and Irv liked to expose each other’s faults and failures in a competition of superiority. She liked to tell about the time he hired the wrong man to run his shop in Baltimore—
He was a nice boy, what are you talking about?—
who took to wearing the flapper dresses he was supposed to be selling—
I said there was a dress code, so he took me literally
—and because Irv hardly ever visited the store like a good manager should—
It was so far away
—this man in a dress scared women out of the store telling them things like if only they weren’t so fat they’d look as good in the dress as he did
—Well, someone should tell it like it is.
It’s stories like that, said Millie, that show you just how soon he’d have been out of business had she not been there to knock some sense into him.

Oh yeah, he’d say. He’d say he’d like to see where she’d be if it weren’t for him—
With Melvin Finkelstein, that doctor from Harvard, that’s where I’d be, I should have married Melvin when I had the chance
. Yeah, he’d say, the poor Russian Jewish girl who didn’t even have a penny in her pocket—
I had everything I needed thank you very much
—who walked into his shop and rang his bell in her torn pedal pushers—
Torn, my tuchas
—whom he took pity on and hired as a salesgirl—
I was your best salesgirl
—who all day long punched clack-clack-clack-ka
ching
at the heavy black cash register—
I always paid you back whatever I borrowed—
and holy mackerel if someone could just have told him what he was getting into, boy oh boy.

Sometimes it’s in fun, their bantering. But often it turns to bickering that turns to vicious verbal attacks. “Nobody cares, Irving,” she’d say, or “Shut your mouth,” he’d say, as if the anger inside them—an anger so deep that it is before Bess’s time and beyond her comprehension—has no choice but to bubble to the surface in small explosions of hostility. The tension, like smoke, makes anyone else in the room cough and leave. Bess has tried to tease out the roots of their anger to no avail. She thinks maybe it stems from their inability to have children of their own, genetically speaking, for it is one topic they won’t talk about. But then it could be anything, for what does Bess know about keeping a marriage afloat for sixty-five years? What does she know about marriage, period? She would like to believe that her grandparents loved each other once, deeply and passionately, to know they were happy in their lives as a whole, but then what does that say about marriage, that the descent into misery is directly related to the number of years a couple spends together, the accumulated anger and grief winning out in the end? Where is the yin and yang in old age? It’s as if Millie and Irv’s imbalanced inner state manifests itself on the outside, the way they walk slowly and diagonally, bumping into things and losing their footing.

And still, despite all their fighting, Bess feels lucky to have them in her life. They shower her with all the love they withhold from each other, it seems. How important it is to have family nearby, thinks Bess, as she turns onto their street. She loves the moment when they open the door, smiling and aching to hug her, saying,
Come, come, dear
as she walks into their embrace.

“How’s my birthday girl!” Irv yells out, beaming, squeezing her shoulders. “It’s good to see you, sweetheart. We haven’t seen you for ages.”

“For God’s sake,” says Millie. “You just saw her last week. What’s wrong with you?” She knocks his chest with the back of her hand and shoos him aside. “Bess dear, you made good time. Was there traffic?” Millie grabs Bess’s face in a tight grip and gives her cheek an exaggerated kiss. Whereas Irv is slow, soft, and gentle, Millie is strong and hard-angled.

“No, not really. I’m sorry I’m late.” Bess rotates her jaw and rubs her cheek where Millie has pressed on it. She wipes her shoes on a doormat that has ducks around its perimeter. “For you,” she says, handing Millie a homemade caramelized pear pie. “I haven’t made this in a while but I seem to remember you liking it, Gramp.”

“You know it!” He beams, bopping her playfully on the nose.

Bess feels like a giant standing next to her grandparents. She figures they must be down to under five feet by now, and they can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds each. They were never big people, but lately they seem particularly small and getting smaller, like thawing snowmen: their wrists thin as twigs, their clothes too big for their frames, their round faces now sallow and sagging so their crooked noses stick farther out. She can look down and see the brown sun spots on Irv’s scalp through thin rows of gray hair and the bits of dandruff stuck to the outside folds of his big ears, wrinkled like dried apricots. Millie’s silver hair is thinning, too, but she has it styled and sprayed into place each week, preserving its pouf by sleeping on a special moon-shaped pillow. At eighty-six, Irv couldn’t give two farts what he looked like, his white dress shirt hanging haphazardly over his belt, his fly undone. But the day Millie, who is four years younger, gives up on her appearance is the day she gives up on life, she likes to say. The women’s fashion magazines still pile up at her bedside, her closets are still full of seasonal ensembles. She dons her pantsuits for appointments in the city and her jogging suits for her morning walks around the neighborhood or, when it’s too cold out, around the top floor of the mall before it opens. Today she has on a black sweater, pearls, and gray slacks with a perfect crease down the front and back of each leg. “I like your sweater,” says Bess, making conversation. “Where’d you get it?”

Millie places the pie on the kitchen counter. “You like it? I don’t remember where I got it. You want to try it on?”

“No, that’s okay. It looks good on you.” Bess has to be careful distributing compliments in their house, for they will offer her anything they own if she shows interest.

“So tell us,” says Irv, leading her into the living room, “how does it feel to be sixteen?”

Bess chuckles. “I’ll always be sixteen to you, is that it, Gramp?”

“Sweet, Bessie. You’ll always be my sweet little girl.”

“Big charmer over there,” Millie calls out from the kitchen. “He’s forgotten how old you are, don’t let him fool you. He’s terrible. Only has one grandchild you’d think he’d remember how old she is.”

“Of course I remember how old my sweet granddaughter is, what are you talking about?” Irv yells this out, then leans in toward Bess with raised eyebrows.
Thirty-five
, she whispers. “Thirty-five!” he yells, triumphantly. “Twice as sweet! A very grown-up, accomplished young lady.”

“Ech,” groans Millie.

“Bessie, come see my latest acquisition. Come.” He takes a book from the shelf and motions for her to follow him. “Mildred,” he yells, flicking on the light at the top of a dank staircase. “We’re going downstairs, we’ll be right back.”

The spiral wooden stairway to the basement creaks with each step. The walls are cement and the air is considerably cooler. Irv pulls a string from a bulb in the middle of the room and the harsh light shines on dozens of pairs of eyes surrounding them, staring blankly in their direction—an eerie, unsmiling audience of stiff anorexic bodies, some pointing their accusatory fingers at Bess, some looking upward as if in contemplation, some about to take a step, a few missing an arm, one in the corner disturbingly headless, all upright and female and frightening in their thinness, their nakedness, their having been crowded into this cell like prisoners of war. “Your mannequins freak me out every time, Gramp. I don’t understand why you still keep them.”

“They keep me company, these ladies. And they keep quiet.” He smiles and winks at Bess. He must have about thirty or forty of them, Bess figures. He started bringing them home from his dress shop when they got scuffed or broken and had to be replaced. There would be five or six mannequins at a time on display in the shop’s front windows, each with its own distinct wig and dress and maybe a shawl or handbag. He liked seeing them each morning.
Hello girls
, he’d say,
keeping an eye on the store, are you?
He grew attached to them and felt in some odd way it was his duty to bring them home after they’d served their purpose. But after a while, he started to buy them quicker than he needed them, looking for unique ones with distinct markings or more movable parts. Once he retired, he slowed his purchases down considerably, mostly because he was running out of room and Millie was on his case about it to no end. Bess had the feeling he spent a lot of time down here among his harem.

“Look,” he says, pulling one out from behind a box in the corner. “I just got her from a store in Northeast.” She is dark brown with long thin fingers and—as her grandfather proceeds to point out—movable at the wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck, waist, and knees. She has full lips and black, painted-on eyebrows, but her most noticeable feature is her Afro, as she is one of the few mannequins in the room with hair.

“How old is she?”

“Probably a ’70s model. She’s scuffed at the joints, but other than that she’s in perfect shape. Look, someone drew a peace sign around her belly button.”

“But she’s supposed to wear clothes. What’s she doing with a belly button?”

“That’s the beauty of it. They probably needed the belly button to show off low miniskirts or high halter tops. Remember halter tops? I’m going to name her Peace.”

Bess stares at her eyes, which are gazing confidently up toward a corner of the ceiling. Her stillness is spooky, as if when the lights go out and the humans leave she might come alive and incite her fellow mannequins to revolt.

Irv leaves the room for a moment and returns with a cassette player. He plugs it in and presses “play,” and the room suddenly sounds like a smoky bar. “T-Bone Walker,” says Irv. “Best blues player there ever was. Peace, would you like to dance?” He positions her arms—one around his waist, the other around his neck—picks her up, and with closed eyes dances her around to the old scratchy recording of Walker’s “Hypin’ Woman Blues.”

Bess watches him. The reasons for her grandfather’s fondness for female mannequins is probably not all that difficult to figure out, she thinks. Students in a Psych 101 class might comment on his loneliness, his need for ownership and control, to savor the past and forget about aging, to create a safe haven among friends, not to mention any sexual overtones Bess doesn’t want to contemplate. But what’s puzzling is his interest in this particular mannequin, this African-American ’70s beauty, which makes Bess think she really doesn’t know her grandfather well, or at least the man he was in his younger days. Maybe he was a swinger. Maybe he dated women like Peace before he married Millie. Maybe he didn’t do a whole lot of what he really wanted to do in the eighty-six years he’s been on this earth, which is why he’s dancing around his basement with a mannequin in his arms, humming, swaying, smiling, imagining.